Romney, as always, is missing the fictional cartoon forest for the trees. As FactCheck.org notes, many circumstances of Julia’s (fake!!) life don’t track: Obama “contends that Julia, as a senior citizen, will have to pay ‘$6,350 extra per year’ for a health care plan similar to Medicare. But that’s an out-of-date cost estimate based on a year-old plan that since has been made substantially more generous.” Many more inconsistencies, right this way.

Confidential to Mitt Romney: Hypotheticals aren’t inherently misleading; Julia is misleading. And isn’t “Obama is fudging the truth” a much stronger counter-argument than “the cartoon lady isn’t real”? Mitt Romney has contempt for most, if not all, people, but here’s an instance in which his rhetoric would actually be more powerful if he didn’t assume everyone listening was incapable of understanding nuance.